September 24, 2005

brilliantly creepy dermal display

This is too brilliant/funny/weird for words. Artist "nanogirl" made a startling visualization of a "dermal display". It's a big QT download, but well worth your bandwidth. And see if you don't LOL twice, right around 20 seconds in ;-)

In his book Nanomedicine, Volume I: Basic Capabilities [available on the web at http://www.nanomedicine.com/NMI.htm ], Robert A. Freitas Jr. describes [in section 7.4.6.7 (page 204)] a "programmable dermal display" in which a population of about 3 billion display pixel robots would be permanently implanted a fraction of a mm under the surface of the skin, covering a rectangle 6 cm x 5 cm on the back of the hand. Photons emitted by these pixel bots would produce an image on the surface of the skin. This pixelbot array could be programmed to form any of many thousands of displays. Each display would be capable of two functions: (1) presenting to the user data received from the large population of medical bots that roam the user's body; (2) conveying instructions from the user to that same large population of bots. The display could be activated or deactivated by finger tapping on the skin.

Kind of lends new meaning to "skinning" your display. So what dermal theme will you be running?